While Trump promised to combat concentrated economic power on the campaign trail, he has since positioned himself as one of the most pro-monopoly presidents in history. On January 4, his team selected Jay Clayton—a Wall Street mergers and acquisitions attorney who specializes in corporate consolidation—to head the SEC. Recently, a top Trump adviser signaled approval for the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, writing in The New York Times that there’s basically nothing wrong with “a high level of concentration in an industry.” And the president-elect himself has been playing nice with the CEO of Sprint, just as the company seeks approval for a controversial merger with T-Mobile.

As Trump takes to Fox News to attack the “dumb market” and Mike Pence embraces economic nationalism, it’s now clear that the leaders of GOP have adopted Peter Thiel’s perspectives on competition and concentrated power. While the word “competition” was once as revered on the right as “patriotism,” “liberty,” or “family,” conservatives are now ceding it to progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who are increasingly focused on fighting monopoly power and restoring competitive markets.

In June, Warren delivered a major speech entitled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy” that laid out the essence of her economic philosophy: Over the last three decades, a trend of corporate consolidation has created an unprecedented concentration of power in the economy and undermined the functioning of markets. Just about every industrial sector—think airlines, agriculture, telecoms, and beyond—has been consolidated under a small number of corporations with growing power to set prices and fix the rules of the game.

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Over the last decade, the number of major US airlines fell from nine to four. Five insurance giants now control over 83 percent of the country’s health-insurance market. Three companies control 99 percent of the drug stores in the country. One company sells roughly 80 percent of corn seeds and more than 90 percent of soybean seeds. After decades of steady consolidation—and despite financial reform—several of the country’s biggest banks are officially “too big to fail.”

Rising consolidation and declining competition get to the heart of what’s wrong with our economy—fueling the complaints of Clinton and Trump voters alike.

When corporations devour their rivals rather than competing with them, the nation’s workers and consumers have fewer choices. This means more cash for some executives and shareholders, but it generally means higher consumer prices, lower wages, threats to the quality of products and services, stifled innovation, and entrenched political power.

Comcast’s consolidation of the cable market, for example, has been good for the company’s bottom line, but it’s had serious negative impacts on cost and quality. Americans now pay far more for cable and Internet services than consumers in other industrialized countries, and we get worse service.

Wal-Mart’s domination hasn’t just destroyed small businesses or hurt wages and working conditions in the retail sector. It’s also hurt the suppliers who make the products—forcing them to reduce their own wages and often cut back on quality so that they can remain in business with the behemoth.

Declining competition increases the risk of crisis. The failure rate for banks with assets of more than $1 billion was seven times greater than for lower-asset banks. As Warren put it, “Concentrated markets create concentrated political power.” The bigger monopolists get, the more resources they can spend on lobbying government to change the rules or protect their advantages. This is how fossil-fuel companies and utility monopolies thwart action to mitigate climate change or how the biggest banks avoid rules that undermine their riskiest practices.

This isn’t supposed to be a partisan issue. The idea that monopolies are bad for an economy goes all the way back to Adam Smith, who saw how the British East India Company destroyed producers. Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of laisse-faire economics, was adamant that monopolies are not only a threat to markets but also to human freedom.

While Republicans have been skeptical of antitrust enforcement since Robert Bork came on the scene in the late 1970s, Democrats have been part of the problem too. Bill Clinton took antitrust out of the party platform in 1992, and, only in 2016—with a push from Bernie Sanders—was the plank restored.

For Democrats, competition policy is an opportunity to do some jiu-jitsu on Trump. The president-elect built his Rust Belt appeal by railing against hyper-concentrated political and economic power. Progressives, unlike the incoming administration, can demonstrate to these voters that they will actually do something about it.

Democrats have had a hard time explaining complex policies like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank to the public. By focusing on concentrated economic power, Democrats can—in the tradition of the trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt—keep it simple. As Warren described, the party can build a clear economic platform on efforts to “prevent cheating, protect taxpayers, and maintain competition.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Thiel makes the argument that “capitalism and competition are opposites.” He explains that “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.” It’s fitting that Thiel is an economic guru to Trump—a man whose only real ideology has been the relentless pursuit of profit.

It’s up to Democrats to present a different view of how markets can and should work.

Justin Talbot-ZornTwitterJustin Talbot-Zorn is a Truman National Security Fellow and founder of Upaya Strategies, a public interest consultancy. He served as Legislative Director to three Democratic Members of Congress. Recent bylines: The Nation, The Guardian ,Time, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, CNN, Harvard Business Review.

Once competition is removed, services and/or products value always drop. The problem is with large corporations taking loses to drive smaller competition out, then turning around and driving the overall value down to recuperate and make profits. The devaluation almost always makes the service and/or product take more disposable income to acquire than what it was originally.

Competition is needed to bring value up, but how do you do or maintain that? Corporate giants keep smaller competition from even trying to compete and have control of our government. This has been going on long before Trump's election. Nothing will be corrected if money is controlling our government. Both the RNC and DNC are infected with money. Grassroots movements is needed to fight it and electing Keith Ellison would be a visible first step, but I digress.

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Karin Eckvallsays:

January 15, 2017 at 8:29 pm

Wall Streeters on CNBC regularly talk about the airline industry oligopoly created by Obama.

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William Kostaksays:

January 15, 2017 at 5:48 pm

He explains that “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.”
Doesn't that say it all. Thiel, in a sense, is right. Economic theory states that in an economy with perfect competition, all excess profits (a.ka., economic rents) are eliminated, to the benefit of everyone. Consumers get to buy the best products at the lowest prices, and producers have the incentive to continually improve their products and sell them for the lowest prices or else be driven from the market. Of course business people (a.k.a. monopolists) hate competition and will do everything they can to eliminate it. That is human nature. Every single person on the face of this earth hates being in competition with another (especially if that other is smarter, more talented, or just plain better than you). But it is the competition that brings out the best in all of us. This also illustrates the essence of what government is for. The government establishes rules and enforces those rules to preserve competition and to keep people from cheating to get around those rules. The fact that the Republicans are showing their true colors by undermining competition in favor of monopoly shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. The Republicans are the party of the rentier class, they always have been and they always will be.

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Stephen Hamersays:

January 15, 2017 at 4:51 am

The end state of a process of business consolidation is a corporate state.

Once the "managers" of that state have been - usually violently - removed, you will have a fully-socialised system of property ownership.